Blog posts tagged with 'guidebooks'

Kindly contributed by Keith Bellows, Editor in Chief of National Geographic Traveler and author of 100 Places That Can Change Your Child's Life, published (naturally) by National Geographic. The book is a Whitman's Sampler of what the world has to offer. It’s not just about where, but how and why to travel, with kids.

Refreshingly direct and engaging, this new edition of Caroline Courtauld’s richly illustrated and indispensable guide covers Burma's culture, long history and religion with grace and authority. With many fine color maps (as is the custom with the excellent Odyssey series), hundreds of photographs and well-chosen literary excerpts.
In honor of the historic visit of the remarkable Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi to the United States, we highlight this guide along with other new and noteworthy books on Myanmar.

How many have you visited? This beautifully illustrated compendium of World Heritage Sites, just revised, includes color photographs, a map and succinct description of each of the 936 archaeological sites, monuments, cities or parks inscribed by UNESCO from 1978 to 2012. Organized by order of inscription (Galapagos was the first), this fourth edition includes the 25 sites added in 2011 — from pastoral Cevannes in south-central France (so eloquently described in Robert Louis Stevenson's

"They're easy to miss, the off-the-beaten-track green spaces of Paris. But whether by metro or on foot — Julia Childs' way of getting to know the city — you can find them, while simultaneously discovering out-of-the-way quartiers, a rare pleasure for most travelers.

The irrepressible Fiona Caulfield writes in the new Love Goa guide, that “by the end of the 16th century, Goa, then known as Goa Dourado or Golden Goa, was the capital of the world’s spice trade and one of the richest places on earth, with a population larger than London or Paris.” The convents, seminaries and parish churches, like the dazzling Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. While in Goa, she also suggests a visit to Tiracol Fort, a well-preserved and compact 17th-century building, perched on a cliff at the northerly tip of Goa, which is run as a seven-room heritage hotel and “lovely for lunch”.

Wow, these are good. The first two all-color Lonely Planet country guides are head-and-shoulders above their forebears: not just brighter but also genuinely enhanced with real maps you can use, crisp red icons for sections on sleeping, eating, shopping and activities, and well-deployed color throughout; proper and place names, for example, stand out from the text in teal. In addition to all new, all color France and all new, all color Spain, 33 new editions from Austria to Taiwan got make-overs with two-color maps and design.